1. In the beginning the Web was wild and without form. And Dries said "Let there be a website," and behold, there was drop.org, and he saw that it was good.
2. And on the second day Dries separated sessions from bootstrap and database and form system and made sure data could be retrieved.
3. And on the third day, Dries created the taxonomies and user accounts, and populated them with vocabularies and friends from his dormitory.
4. And on the fourth day Dries implemented nodes and comments, and the users all posted in the forums and said very clever things.
5. And on the fifth day Dries created text filters and blog posts and aggregators and lo, the content did pile up most gratuitously.
6. And on the sixth day Dries fixed all the security holes created on days one through five, and this took all night.
7. So on the seventh day he slept, and the community took over and Dries hasn't had to write a line of code since.

1. And so it came to pass that drupal.org was created to house the software for drop.org and Drupal was made available to everyone, free and without charge, in perpetuity, and made so that people could change it and give those changes back.
2. And then the Community was formed, and their Plumbing, and they evangelized the word of Drupal far and wide and word of its glory spread from sea to shining sea.
3. And drupal.org grew an order of magnitude every year and drop.org languished and then eventually its hardware crashed without backups.
4. And drop.org passed into memory and was lost, occasionally seen in screenshots that Dries might post to awe the Community with what things were like in the Beginning.
5. And then drupal.org did one day crash, and the Community leapt forth and bought new servers and the true power of the Community was known.
6. And some became most famous and others outside the Community became most jealous. Indeed, Mambo was so jealous it simply imploded and then renamed itself Joomla!.

1. And there came a time that Community had grown so large that it had quite a following, and many in the community rose to prominence and were eventually called Disciples by the community, though Dries believed not in such things himself.
2. But the Community has the Power, said Dries, and if that is the will of the community, then so be it.
3. And the Community vowed to have a party, twice a year, once on the left side of the Great Sea and once on the right side of the Great Sea, and this party proved to be expensive and draining to coordinate, but the Community had an endless appetite for more of these parties. And Dries declared that these parties would be known as DrupalCons, to honor the Con.
4. And the Disciples did form an Association to handle the organizing of the Cons, and chose Dries to lead this Association, and then instead of getting anything done, the Disciples spun their wheels a lot and bickered internally, but if nothing else the Association did put on a good party, even if it had no other value to the Web.

1. One of Dries' Disciples came to be known amongst all of the others. While responsible for a great many things, this Disciple was most known for giving Druplicon his third dimension, and a cute little tilt to the drop.
2. But there came a time when the Diva grew frustrated that Drupal was growing outside of his control. The Diva had a vision for Drupal, but the Community was growing in other directions, and this vexed the Diva very much.
3. And then Diva made changes to the code, but the Community disagreed, and the Diva pushed them through anyway.
4. And then came a time that the Diva was not able to push through a change; when Dries himself said "No, I am afraid you cannot do this." And that was the last straw. The Diva became angry, and said a great many dire things.
5. And the Diva said, "Fine, I'm taking my icon and going home." But the community responded "No, sir, for you made your icon GPL and we intend to keep it, and we too will profane it with hello kitties and unicorns because we can."
6. And the Diva shouted in rage, but eventually left, unfulfilled. Over time the Diva's contributions would be purged from Drupal, one by one, though traces of the Diva will always be seen. And the Diva would be forgotten.
7. Sometimes, late at night, the angry wailing of the Diva can be heard, but the Community no longer remembers and does not know what this means.

1. As Drupal grew, and its power spread, there came those who coveted that power, and sought to harness and control it and make it their own. And they came by the dozen, quietly, seeking the way in.
2. And then Dries joined with some of them, and created the 800 Pound Gorilla, a corporate monster with strong hands that spoke with two mouths.
3. To the Community it spoke with the mouth of help and friendship and growth and it tended and nurtured and gave resources aplenty.
4. But to the rest of the world it spoke with the mouth of ownership and it said it had Dries and therefore it had Drupal, and so its power would be as strong as Drupal.
5. And thus did the Gorilla come to guard the gates to the world of Corporate Enterprise, jealously growing its power while carefully tending to the Community Garden. And the Community both feared and loved the Gorilla, happy to take from it while occasionally blaspheming it in dark rooms where they thought it could not hear them.

Our node who art in Drupal, hallowed be thy name.
Thy entity come, thy fields be one, on users and on everything.
Give us this day our daily cron,
And forgive us our arrays,
As we forgive them that recurse over them.
And lead us not into druplication,
But deliver us from eval.
For coder is the standard and the power and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.

Offensive to religious people, or to members of the Drupal community? I'm both, but didn't find it offensive at all. I too think there need to be more chapters, but perhaps the community has yet to write them...

Is it really what happened? This is a pretty stylized, tongue-in-cheek parody of what happened. I wouldn't take the chapter about The Diva seriously. In short form: Yes Steven had serious disagreements with the community (and ultimately Dries) about direction and a few other things, and left the community. Was he really a diva? I dunno. I don't want to say that. I wrote what I did as an allegory, but do not take it as accurate history.

Though funny to read, I have to say I get a little uneasy with all the praise in the comments. Some of those negative bits might be unfair, and perhaps would be better expressed in a different tone. I can't be the judge.

I'm late to the party having only seen bits on IRC and somehow missing there was a whole blog entry but I have to say this is great! Hopefully those who may be offended will take it in good humor. It's a bit cutting in parts but still overall funny. :)

Nicely done, Merlin. Enjoyable and instructive at once, just like some similar great books out there. :-)

Merlin (Earl) is the most natural writer I've ever come across, and this is another demonstration of why. I still look forward to reading the to be finished some-day first novel (I have the first few chapters stored on another computer someplace -- I think it may be time to re-read them!).

I only started thinking about copyright on this today. That said, derivative works of text are nearly always okay so long as they're not plagiarizing the original, particularly if they're parodies. In any case the only copyright here is the implicit copyright you get, but posting text on the internet pretty much destroys whatever copyright you want, so most likely I'll eventually decide it's Creative Commons of some flavor.

1. And later there came the magician and he looked upon the face of Drupal and spoke, but how do the meek create lists without the Knowledge of the code? And he gifted them views.
2. And the people saw that this was good and rejoiced
3. And later they came before the wizard and said in supplication, but sometimes your great gift does not work in my temple with the following list of unreliable modules, why doth views suck so
4. And when they had paused for reply they said again, it worketh not, hath thou forsaken me?
5. And after another brief pause they became angry and rained venomous rage upon the wizard
6. And after some time had passed they realized their mistake and returned to close the issue. But too late the Wizard had noticed. And he forgiveth them not.
7. And they were banished from Drupal for all time as a lesson to the rest.

@Annonymous In otherwords, you were cast into the pit of hell because you didn't bother learning about how aggregation, and grouping works? (reading in between the lines there). In any case, the meek should learn to read MYSQL queries. It's really not that hard, just takes a weekend of familiarizing yourself. You'll gain 1) the ability to recognize why views isn't doing what you thought it should do, 2) the ability to see when you are doing something terrible that will bring your poor webserver to it's knees. I'm always ironic, of course. Except in some circumstances where it makes sense not to be.